A Single Team Working on a AAA Game Doesn’t Happen Often Anymore

by
William D’Angelo
, posted 26 minutes ago / 104 Views

The head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty speaking in a Q&A at PAX West 2022 was asked if the pandemic played a role in the large number of video game delays over the last couple of years. He did say the pandemic played a part in it, however, he did say “how we make games is evolving.”

How games are developed today are very different than they used to be, according to Booty. The majority of AAA games nowadays are developed by multiple teams.

“The idea of a single team under one roof really doesn’t happen that often anymore. I’ll use an example – our Perfect Dark team down in Santa Monica, The Initiative,” said Booty via VideoGamesChronicle.

“So, we just did this big partnership with Crystal Dynamics, and I read online, ‘oh, this must mean there’s a problem or something’ – it’s quite the opposite, right? You’ve got this veteran team at Crystal Dynamics, a big AAA team with over 100 people that becomes available. Of course we want to work with them, particularly if they’ve made a game like that before.

“And that’s how we’ve done an awful lot of work. If you think about Age of Empires 4 which just launched last fall, that was made in partnership with Relic Studios up in Vancouver, great partnership. And even something like Flight Simulator, we worked with a studio in France called Asobo.

“And that kind of co-development, when you’re working out with people like Certain Affinity, Iron Galaxy, Blackbird [Interactive], all those studios are so key to the products that we make. That, though, also adds some complexity where if one of those studios has problems it then impacts the schedule.

“So the days are gone when you can sort of go ‘everybody, round up the team in the cafeteria, I want to tell everybody to work harder this Wednesday.’ That’s long gone, it’s gotten a lot more complicated than that.”

A life-long and avid gamer, William D’Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

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